1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an automatic telephone answering system, and more particularly, relates to a method for automatically transferring a speech message registered previously by a user in an automatic telephone answering system to a telephone set of a designated party at a reserved time.
2. Related Art
An automatic telephone answering system responds to an incoming telephone call if the call is not answered by a user. Such systems as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,278,896 for Automatic Answering Telephone Apparatus issued to Sakata et al., may play a prerecorded message or record a message from the caller. Some systems may offer the caller or the called party additional choices, such as the ability to access individual extensions by dialing extension or individual numbers by spelling the person's name on the caller's telephone keypad, and the ability to connect to a backup person in the absence of the user, the person to whom the call is directed. Other systems such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,436,963 for Telephone Answering Method And Apparatus issued to Fitzpatrick et al., inform the caller of the remote location where the user is scheduled to be, and at the caller's option, transfer the incoming telephone call to the scheduled location or telephone number of the user. U.S. Pat. No. 4,958,366 for Telephone Answering Method And Device Providing Outgoing Message In A Selected Language issued to Hashimoto, even offers the caller the ability to receive the prerecorded message in one of several different foreign languages. U.S. Pat. No. 5,075,894 for Telephone Message Forwarding Apparatus issued to Iwase et al., automatically and sequentially transfers the same prerecorded message to a plurality of persons at different destinations. Recent systems such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,533,104 for Telephone Answering Device And Method issued to Weiss et al., allows the user to switch an incoming telephone call from a caller to the message recording or answering machine after the user has initially spoken to the caller.
Generally, when an incoming telephone call from the caller is recorded a recording medium such as a tape or an audio memory, the user can access the content of the recorded message by either manually pressing a playback button located on the automatic telephone answering system when the user is present at the automatic telephone answering system shortly after the incoming telephone call, or by having previously configured the system to forward the recorded message to the user at a remote location when the user, who is absent from the automatic telephone answering system, calls in to request for the transmission of such a recorded message. In such conventional message reproduction techniques, as I have observed however, the transfer of the recorded message is performed only when a request for such a message is externally made. Further, it is impossible to transfer the user message to a remote location associated with a desired telephone number at a particular time in the absence of the user.